This YouMoz entry was submitted by one of our community members. The author’s views are entirely his or her own (excluding an unlikely case of hypnosis) and may not reflect the views of Moz.

Remember the late 90s? Those were the times! I remember staying awake late at night, just because the internet connection was slightly better. I was actually happy to download larger files without getting disconnected. People were not so obsessed with speed and loading times, but with the availability in general.

Do you remember the sound of your trustworthy modem connecting you to the World?

In this day and age, website availability is still a major problem. Most of us experience this on a daily basis. We don’t get all cranky about loading times overnight but we do get more pretentious with each technology leap. Would the modern man wait 20-30 seconds for a page to load completely? Yep, nor would Google.

Your site needs to be in a pretty dark place to get in trouble with search engines, simply due to higher loading times. According to Google, less than 1% of all queries are affected by the site speed signal. In fact, it is far more likely to lose some prospective customers simply because they can get the service elsewhere, without having to wait for a page to load. We tend to take fast loading web resources for granted.

Nearly one-third of the population is online. We live in a world where ~2.27 billion people expect to have a web page completely available in just a few seconds or less. Or do they? Technological advancements are made, but not all can take advantage of them.

“The future is already here — it's just not very evenly distributed.”

This great quote by William Gibson describes pretty well the situation in some geographical regions. If you check your analytics account, I’m pretty sure you will see Africa underperforming in webpage loading times.

Is it worth it to improve your website’s loading time?

Website owners are obsessed with their rankings, quality of traffics, conversions rates, reputation management and the overall well-being of their online presence. It is quite frustrating how website availability is overlooked.

A site might be up and running, but virtually inaccessible to some. Problems do occur and more often than you might think. Unlike the available online resources from the 90s, the majority of websites rely on server side scripting, which on its part relies on properly functioning databases. The point is that a lot more can go wrong with a website nowadays, a lot more than it used to.

“I was wondering what benefits there are investing the time and money into speeding up an eCommerce site. We are currently averaging 3.4 seconds of load time per page and I know from webmaster tools they hold the mark to be at closer to 1.5 seconds. Is it worth it to get to 1.5 seconds? Any tips for doing this?”

That’s a pretty tough one. No one can tell you. People would usually expend the opinion that it would not hurt to do everything possible to make your site run better and they will be right. This is the perfect scenario. We, however, live in a world where optimal decisions are far more valuable than absolute ones. In this case 3.4 seconds is the average loading time. This means that it could be significantly higher in certain hours or geographical locations.

If you have a local site and sell to the local market, then there is no need for you to serve a page in 1.5 seconds for people on the other end of the world. You simply need to perform that well in your local market.

Measuring the speed

Due to some mild problems with loading speeds with a website I look after, I went to find a proper way to measure:

Website uptime

Webpage response time

Web page loading time

Availability from various remote locations, worldwide

After trying out a couple of services I decided to go with a combination of two. I figured I need one paid service in order to gain access to more features, detailed reports, sms alerts and a large set of remote locations to test from. I went with websitepulse.com. There are some great alternatives out there. I can’t really call them substitutes because the services are pretty good. I chose to stick with that company because their service has all I currently require. Their homepage looks a little outdated, but that kind of makes me want to think they put their effort and resources in the service itself.

The other way I track the average loading times of my pages is through the Google Analytics site speed report. Last year I had to add one extra line to the GA tracking code to get the feature, but now it is a part of the code. It might be a good idea to update the code at this point. I still use the old code _trackPageLoadTime in my Google Analytics tracking. 10% of the traffic is evaluated and I get the information based on those 10%, which includes only traffic browsers that support the HTML5 Navigation Timing interface or have the Google Toolbar installed.

When you update to the new code to _setSiteSpeedSampleRate(), the sample rate will fall down to 1%. You can always increase it to 10% and that’s about it, at least for now. Here you can learn more about the site speed feature.

I found this feature to be really valuable when explaining loading time issues to the web developers at the company and also presenting the data to the management. The feature seems to keep both parties at bay. It gives all the necessary data to the development team, page by page.

Also the visualizations are pretty great and can make a good addition to your next presentation.

Now, here is why I decided to go with a paid service. While the information from Google Analytics is pretty useful and well organized, it isn’t actually that accurate, mostly due to the limited number of samples. For sites with very high traffic the information might be closer to the actual figures. I don’t want to trash talk a free service I love. It is great for what it says it does.

I did the following test. I’ve sampled my site in January with both Google Analytics and WebSitePulse. I chose the United Kingdom for this test. Here are the results from WebSitePulse.

There is a noticeable change from the 14th of January. This is when we moved the site from our servers to a data center. We had issues with the average loading times for quite some time and I bet this was one of the best decisions in the last couple of years. You can see how the average loading time went down from ~4.5 to ~0.95 overnight. The site had a lot of heavy server side scripts, containing a lot of exceptions and some heavy communication with the data base.

This is the information I have from Google Analytics for January. I’ve expected to see something similar to the chart above. Here I got only 827 samples and in the chart above I have 10 times the amount.

Here you can see a slight improvement, but nothing too dramatic. According to this report I got an improvement of 1.79 seconds. It had no dramatic effect on the bounce rate, but you can see it going down a bit. Then again, it might be something else.

So with 10 times the data I got more accurate results. I’ve tested the site every five minutes, to make sure I have a good enough data set to work with. With Google Analytics all you get is 10%. It is quite useful and pretty good for a free tool, but I won’t close down my paid account just yet. In fact, go out and try any of the remote website monitoring services. Most of them have unlimited 30 days trials, which will give you valuable intel on the current state of your website.

Google Analytics seem to have a great feature in the works and I’m really optimistic about it! I’m curious to know how the Site Speed feature is working out for you.

Tom Critchlow wrote a great coverage on the feature. It might be a good place to read more about Site Speed.

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Comments
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I have spent time tweaking load times like crazy and haven't ever seen any ranking changes. One thing I will say is to invest in a dedicaed server or at least a VPS if you want any kind of control. There are certain aspects of pageload such as browser caching and compression that have to be tweaked on the server and a lot of cheap hosts don't support it.

Cheaper hosting solutions are like Ryanair. They will make you pay extra for anything different than what 80% of websites need. Caching and compression are definitely a good place to start. We did that and we were able to shave off a couple of second. VPS is the bare minimum each business needs. :)

"Matt Cutts stated that only in 1 out of 100 searches does page speed show a noticeable change in rankings, and there are only 1 in a 1000 sites which have slow speed as a big issue: www.youtube.com/watch?v=SO4YuDAkplU

I have a page on one website which has on-page SEO close to perfection for a relatively competitive term, and a few relevant links coming in. There was a query in the SQL on the page that slowed it down - I think the load time was about 4 or 5 seconds. After a few weeks (it wasn't an important page and I knew it would be an interesting test) I fixed the problem and got the load time down to around a second. The following day the page jumped from nowhere (not even the top 20 pages) to page 4 on Google, so that must have been one of the 1 in a 100. ;-)"

It's now on page 2 with no further changes, so in extreme cases, I'd say site speed definitely makes a difference. At times when a visitor to your site has a slow connection, or there are problems with your server, even a 0.5 second improvement in your own tests could make or break whether someone stays on your page or not, it's definitely worth thinking about.

I found exactly the same on an ecommerce site that I was working on - a change by developers caused the site, that had thousands of pages indexed when doing a "site:" search, to drop out of Google when the load time went to being around 20 secs on intial load of the homepage. This all happened in the space of a few days, panic set in and a fix went in shortly after - hey presto the number of pages indexed went right back up, so I believe they were all sat in the supplementary index, clearly showing that site preformance is taken into account.

Ahh yes beer, a very important tool in the SEOs arsenal - as it has been mentioned so many times in this community - an important aspect of online marketing is about building relationships, whether it be with colleagues, social influencers or customers. Psychology is an essential part of what we do!

I have no patients for a slow loading site and no one else does either. Its like that guy on the way to work that is holding back traffic, creating rage amongst other drivers. People just dont have patients. If your site loads too slow users will look elsewhere and if users look elsewhere, guess who else will... Ill give you a hint it rhymes with Noodle.

Page Loading time work much like a directly proportional factor, your site slows down, so will the traffic go down, your site speed increases, the page traffic and performance also increases! Thanks for the post and explaining it in a new perspective!

Awesome post. That's a really interesting take, and the numbers really don't lie. Just curious, how much does that type of hosting cost?

For a smaller site, could a cloud based hosting service offer similar benefits compared to shared hosting? Is the concept similar with co-location? I run a network of comparison sites, and think those in particular would vastly benefit from even an 10-15% increase in speed/performance.

I'm not quite sure, but we paid a pretty penny for it. We are actually paying to house our own hardware, so the price is definitelly not something a small business can easily afford. If you are interested in exact figures I can get the details tomorror :)

No worries, I did a little research myself. It definitely isn't cheap, so might not be worth it for my network of sites. Before the busy season for a few of my sites I plan on running some tests with Amazons Cloud services to see if we get a boost in speed.

One thing I've found that always speeds things up is Asynchronous JavaScript or AJAX. For those who don't know, it makes the JavaScript code process AFTER the page content is fully loaded, so it doesn't slow the content from loading.
To my knowledge, Google Adsense JavaScript has been automatically Async for some time. Google Analytics JavaScript is also set to Async=true by default, but if you have really old Analytics JavaScript on your pages from years back, it could still be loading synchronously. Make sure your pages have the latest Analytics code (and not the ancient urchin code).
If you use social media buttons, whether individual buttons or widgets like AddThis, make sure you set those up for Async loading, as well.
The code I use now for Async social buttons is from http://www.phpied.com/social-button-bffs/
AddThis and other social buttons widgets have their own instructions for making their JavaScript load asynchronously, but they aren't set to Async by default, :(
Also make sure you use Async with any forms you have on landing pages. I had this one client's landing page where the load times went from 2.5 seconds to over 7 seconds on average after they incorporated a very large JavaScript file into their client data collection form (it checked multiple databases for various services). After I Asynced that JS file, it went back to acceptable speeds.

When using wordpress, the loading time is really depends on how many plugins that we use. Be careful as well to use wordpress theme. Some themes are not good for its loading speed. For checking my websites speed, I always use pagespeed firefox add ons.

Serving static content from a different domain or subdomain can improve speeds for visitors. If there is no way to host static content for wordpress on a separate domain, there is one interesting option to explore. I've tried using Dropbox for CDN. It might be a good option for people from the US, but I found it to be a bottleneck from Europe. It migh be me, I'm not quite sure. There are a ton of ptions to explore. I also tried using WP Super Cache. It takes some pressure of your wordpress installation.

Society is all about instant gratification these days. Nobody's gonna hang around and wait for a site to load. If they do, they'll already have a negative opinion of the site before they see the content.

Great post! While bounce rate doesn't seem to be affected much in your case, I wonder what your conversion rate has done with the faster load times? There is an oft cited statistic that Amazon put out several years ago that says that every 100ms in load time cost them 1% in sales. Something to consider!

Improving access times and web server performance often depends on good communication between several teams. Smaller sites have it easy. Not so much with resources, but with internal communication. It is often a one man decision process. With bigger companies, bureaucracy is often the problem. Website performance problems are often right there for everyone to see. The chain of actions required to fix the issue often involves web development, savvy administratiom and prompt financial decisions by the managing staff.

This is very interesting because I think of internet speed as one part of the issue, then I have to consider server speed for websites. I have my own personal Godaddy account with hosting and domains, which are very slow servers. However, my client, Rockland Web Design is using shared hosting and VPS servers, which are pretty fast. We don't really have complaints about speed, unless there are slow times. They work very well! I love my FIOS though. I feel like everything works well most of the time because the speed is so great!

I've came to know a thing or two about different GoDaddy accounts. Have you migrated to 4GH? I'm yet to upgrade several accounts, but first I need to back up everything before doing so. Each hosting account with at least one database has to be backed up before the upgrade can take place. I'm particularly happy with most VPS solutions I've used. VPS also give you flexibility and all the features you need, without the holdbacks of shared hosting. Server speed issues are fairly easy to get off the table. Sadly, global connectivity is out of our reach. On a different note, last weekend I was able to put up a WiFi hotspot in a rural area and got 5-7 people connected right away. I guess we can all help :).

I remember the first time I got a dial up modem, the noise it used to make was amazing! I think this is about competition and the type of company you want to be or want to be perceived as - if all your competitions websites are ligthening fast and yours is slow as a dog is has a negative reflection on the brand you're trying to create.

you can definitely spend a lot of time tweaking whne it comes to speed and it's not really sometthing I have in my armoury, so it's something I pass through to developers to make happen on my behalf - and you've certainly got to make those pips squeak to get the best times, everything needs to be looked at but there are good results to be had all round.

I spent 6 hours yesterday playing with my site after running Page Speed and YSlow tests. Originally my scores were D and C, respectively. After installing some plugins (W3 Total Cache and others) and tweaking my theme, I managed to get the scores to B and A.

This morning I woke up and my Google rankings for two of my target keywords have jumped from 13 and 5, to 10 and 4. Coincidence? I don't think so.

That's great news! Page two to page one. I'll check out the state of a couple of sites myself. When did you notice the difference? Only with grade A? I assume use are serving the static content from a separate subdomain/host?

Another important factor that Page Loading time helps is the bounce rate! The first time experience for any visitor must be as good as possible, don't forget that! (BTW, server load is usually improved as well).

BTW, I need to ask everyone: How do you persuade developers to write better code (SQL, HTML, whatever) that will result in better loading time? I find it extremely challenging even if I prove to business owners and developers that the code can be improved, even if I indicate specific solutions!

And a second note to this: Page Loading Time used to be out of my SEO factor list 5 years , it got in 4 years ago and the last 2 years it seems like a very important factor. Do you believe that sometime in the future, people will keep this factor in mind before they start developing a website?

While load time is important for search engines, I think it's more important for humans. By now, I'd say upward of 95% of people have high-speed Internet, and they no longer have the patience to wait for a site to load longer than two seconds. Then there is the mobile consideration. Mobile connrections are so much slower, so even if your site takes two seconds to load on a desktop or laptop, it won't on a mobile phone.

Nice post Svetoslav, I think that improving load time is so important and I have found spending time optimisng sites even with simple techniques such as optimising all images for web using something like photoshop has improved things. I have also noticed that when I have optimised a site and Google has shown an increase on site preformance under GWT then the crawls stats have also improved with more pages and kilobytes downloaded per day, so to me it is clear of the benefit of optimising a sites load time in regards to Google. Not to mention the impact on user experience of a site that loads quickly, like you have said peoples tolerance for site load times has become very low. I have seen reducing load times reduce bounce rates on numerous occasions.

I agree with your point that websites be should easy to use, but I think you can still use all sorts of content if you have a page optimised in the right way so that the different types of content are not slowing your site down. There are lots of ways around loading larger files so that it doesn't hinder but enrich the users experience, take for instance setting your large images or flash files to load after the rest of the page. I have done this successfully in the past using an onload function. I think the most important thing is that people need to remember they are designing sites around people and not search engines, however with the Panda updates we know that Google is taking this into account.

Site speed really is all about usability. How long can you expect your audience to sit there and wait? We live in an instant world and your site has to keep pace if you want to keep people engaged. You only have a few seconds to make a connection, don't waste half of them on slow load times.

Loading time is one of the directly affecting factors for search engines in some cases. e.g I have a photo blog and I update nearly 10 picutres a week. And if pictures are of large size, the traffic and site impression go down the graph in the coming week. And if I upload pictures of small size, the traffic and impressions go back to normal(high).